Right-Wing Bloggers Wrong About AP Story - Will They Apologize and Retract?
By Bob Geiger
Created Nov 29 2006 - 9:54am
When I think of every time our right-wing counterparts in the political blog
world humiliate themselves, I'm reminded of former NBA star Charles Barkley
who, upon hearing that Tonya Harding [1]was calling herself "the Charles
Barkley of figure skating," said "I was going to sue her for defamation of
character, but then I realized I have no character."

And here we have so many conservative bloggers, after days of castigating
the Associated Press for running what the wingnuts claimed was a fictitious
story about six Sunnis being burned alive in sectarian violence in Iraq on
Friday, having to once again face what a bunch of putzes they really are.

The AP reported last night [2] on eyewitnesses to the immolations, that
occurred when Sunni worshippers were leaving a Mosque on Friday and have
also substantiated the identity of Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who the
AP cited as the primary source for its story that the Sunnis were killed
while the Iraqi military stood by and did nothing.

Said the most recent [3] AP story:

"Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter
contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was
no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for
two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the
police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as
Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire."

You can read the rest of the AP story, which includes the eyewitness
accounts, here [4].

But over the last few days -- ever since a Naval Public Affairs officer
demanded in writing that the AP publish a retraction for the article, which
the military claimed was false -- our little Bloggers for Bush have been
more excited about all of this than Mark Foley at a Boy Scout Jamboree.

"MSM credibility, R.I.P." said Michelle Malkin on her blog [5], while the
Powerline dudes headlined it all [6] with " Story of Sunnis Burned Alive
Going Up In Smoke."

Here's Powerline:

"There is no doubt plenty of violence in Baghdad to go around. But the
current attitude toward the situation in Iraq is one of hysteria. That
hysteria is being shamelessly stoked by news organs like the Associated
Press, who rely--apparently uncritically--on reports from stringers who may
be imposters, and may be agents of the insurgency. Such reports are repeated
endlessly and thereby add to the momentum for surrender in Iraq. The
difficulty of getting reliable reporting out of Iraq should not become an
excuse for an abandonment of all journalistic standards."

How funny is it to hear lectures on "journalistic standards" coming from
these guys?

"It's Official: Media Body Burning Story is Bogus," crowed Newsbusters
[7] -- the wingnut National Enquirer -- who just went mad with glee
proclaiming that "The news that six Sunnis were captured by Shiites, doused
with kerosine [sic] and burned alive, was too sensational to not be picked
up by the mainstream media. But it turns out that the event never happened.
Furthermore, the Iraqi 'spokesman' relied on to give all information
regarding this event is as fictional as the story itself."

Newsbusters took it a step further by also concluding [8] that NBC's
decision to begin calling what's going on in Iraq a "civil war" was based in
part on the "bogus" nature of that story.

Flopping Aces [9], which seems to have started this embarrassing affair, has
been running a lengthy series ominously called "Getting The News From The
Enemy" while The Jawa Report [10] really stands proud and proclaims that
"It's unlikely that the Associated Press and other news agencies will issue
corrections approaching the sensationalism with which they originally pushed
the false stories."

Ouch. That kind of strident crap's got to make their red-state faces pretty
damned crimson about right now.

But then, to grotesquely paraphrase Sir Charles Barkley, they would feel the
shame that's coming to them, but then they realized that they have no shame.

_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson